COMMUNITY COLUMNIST  We don’t cure racial discrimination by discriminating

In the 50-year history of affirmative action, there have been at least 24 significant events which helped determine its present political and legal status. Event 24 was the Nov. 15 decision by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which struck down part of Michigan’s 2006 anti-affirmative action constitutional amendment.

By Bob Ashby

Holland Sentinel

By Bob Ashby

Posted Dec. 3, 2012 at 12:01 AM
Updated Dec 3, 2012 at 3:08 AM

By Bob Ashby

Posted Dec. 3, 2012 at 12:01 AM
Updated Dec 3, 2012 at 3:08 AM

Holland

In the 50-year history of affirmative action, there have been at least 24 significant events which helped determine its present political and legal status. Event 24 was the Nov. 15 decision by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which struck down part of Michigan’s 2006 anti-affirmative action constitutional amendment.

Since its beginning as an executive order by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, only three supportive actions for race or gender preferences have been legislated statutes or citizen initiatives. Most of the other milestones, over 87 percent of the 24, have been either executive orders (five) or court decisions (14).

The most important non-discrimination legislative accomplishment was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, long championed by conservatives but co-opted by liberals after it became apparent that segregationism was a losing position. Supporters of affirmative action like to claim the Civil Rights Act as their own. But the 1964 civil rights milestone was the polar opposite of their divisive position of affirmative action. Instead, by both design and purpose, it codified racial and gender blindness rather than allowing for any special accommodations.

Michigan’s citizen-initiated and solidly citizen-supported amendment simply placed into the state constitution what the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Civil Rights Act had properly established in the first place.

The divided 6th Circuit judges, however, managed to turn normal reason and the English language on their heads. For the majority on the court, as with the social engineers before them, sound reasoning and the self-evident meaning of written sentences are irrelevant and impotent. They are useful relics, at times antagonists. For the 6th Circuit, “equal protection” (14th Amendment), means “special protection” for a select subgroup. In the same way, “without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin” (Civil Rights of 1964, Title IV) means “with regard to.”

The driving force behind the court’s affirmative action brand of law is not the written words of civil rights statutes, but ideological contrivances of them. The contrivances are built on almost completely unchallenged upside-down diversity doctrine. Counterfeit diversity rules, literally.

Mark Davis (Townhall.com) put it well recently: “[The left insists] that even though racism is now one of our foremost societal evils, it must still be practiced — repackaged in the form of race preferences to favor students of color in college, and, one presumes, workers of color in every workplace.”

Michigan did not run afoul of the 1964 Civil Rights Act or the 14th Amendment, it ran afoul of an institutionalized, popularly assumed system of racial prejudice. The system affirmatively acts to bestow privileges and preferential rights to groups of human beings because there are fewer of them with some particular bone structure and skin tone.

The irony of the situation is excruciating. Inequality becomes equality. Judicial decree becomes opportunity. Privileges become rights. Racial balkanization becomes unity. This, against all that is rational, is supposed to create an America where success is achieved rather than bestowed on the basis of racial privilege.

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— Bob Ashby is a resident of Holland. He can be contacted at www.realitycheck101.net, where previous articles are archived.